Will Ascenzo
Will is the lead blogger, copywriter, and copy editor for Gillware Data Recovery and Digital Forensics, and a staunch advocate against the abuse of innocent semicolons.
Whining Western Digital Hard Drive
Cats and dogs whine. Children whine (and some adults, too). And, as it turns out, even hard drives can whine sometimes. While a whining child can be placated (and in rare instances, a whining cat), a hard drive that is…
Western Digital HDD Repair: Winter is Coming
The client in this Western Digital HDD repair case needed pictures and documents recovered from their 320 GB Western Digital hard drive. The drive had failed, producing an audible, rhythmic clicking noise. For a hard drive, clicking is one of the most…
Windows 10 Reset on Hitachi Deskstar
In this Windows 10 reset file recovery case, our client came to us for our Windows 10 reset file recovery services. When their computer had failed to start up, they tried to repair their operating system. Startup failure can happen for…
Dropped External Drive Data Recovery: Life in the Slow Lane
Hard drives were not designed to endure massive impacts while running. This is common knowledge now, especially with the advent of portable external hard drives that can easily tumble off a user’s desk. When our data recovery engineers perform dropped…
Western Digital AAKX Fails After Power Outage
Summer brings us the joys of long days, warm weather, and perfect opportunities to go to the beach. But it also brings us oppressive heat, humidity, and thunderstorms. Lightning strikes occur more frequently in the spring and summer than in…
MacBook Pro: Gray Screen of Death
In this Macbook Pro data recovery case study, the client turned on their laptop one morning and the dreaded “Gray Screen of Death” popped up. This gray screen, which Apple users may be familiar with, signifies a boot error. It’s common…
PGP Encrypted Laptop Not Booting
In this PGP encrypted hard drive recovery case study, the client had used full-drive encryption to secure the data on their laptop. With Symantec PGP whole disk encryption, the entirety of their hard drive was password-protected. PGP encryption, also known…
Seagate ST1000DM003 Not Spinning After Lightning Strike
During the summer, we here at Gillware see an uptick in hard drives that have stopped spinning. These hard drives come into our data recovery lab with shorted control boards. Thunderstorms happen a lot more frequently during the summer, and…
G-RAID Data Recovery Case Study: 8 TB RAID-0 External G-Technology Enclosure
In this case study, the client had been using a G-RAID enclosure as an external device for their Mac Pro. There were two four-terabyte Hitachi hard drives inside the enclosure. A RAID-0 array connected the two drives. The client used…